Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash
I hadn’t heard from him for a while, and he had been complaining about issues with his phone, but I never expected to find out through a Facebook notification from a woman I’d never met, letting me know he had passed away.
I will always be grateful that she took the time to find me and make sure I knew.
There is a starkness to the image she described that resists ornament. It is lonely. It is final. And it leaves behind the difficult work of remembering a human being without turning him into either a saint for the sake of his memory, or a wound for the sake of how I’m handling it.
I leave this here as a memorial to my father. He deserves more than platitudes, and I intend to give him that.
My father was a man who carried more pain than most people ever saw.
After the divorce, everything went downhill. At times, he found friends. At others, lovers. Among them were some amazing people; people who saw parts of him I probably could not see clearly at the time.
When I lived with him, though, he was exhausted. Sad, and carrying hurt in a way that did not announce itself dramatically, but settled into the corners of ordinary life.
He was a man who had, in theory and up to a point, done many of the right things in many of the expected ways. He worked. He built. He tried. He followed the outline that life had handed him for what a man, a husband, and a father was supposed to be.
And still, somehow, he ended up driving alone down Interstate 20 in a truck containing what remained of the life he had built and could still take with him.
With the clarity of today’s loss, I mostly remember when he tried.
And for many of the years when it would have made the most difference, I do not think I understood the level of effort it took for him just to be “fine” whenever someone asked.
It was not until today that I realized I had, years ago, made my own version of the drive down I-20 that seems, in retrospect, to have become the line between the life he was building, and the one he accepted in its place.
Early in my relationship with my wife, when I thought I was losing her, I got into a car that probably was not safe even below the speed limit and drove it much faster than sense should have allowed as I made my way down the same highway. I remember the vivid parts more than the continuous ones: the road, the urgency, the feeling that sitting still would be its own kind of death.
Somewhere after the state line, I realized the alternator was failing. Or maybe I only understood it later. Either way, I kept the speed high. Kept the RPMs high. Kept the machine alive through motion, as if stopping would make everything catch up to me at once.
I am still not entirely sure whether my foot on the pedal was running from what life had become, or running toward a place and people I once called home.
Maybe that is why, today, the image of him on Interstate 20 hurts differently.
Not because I fully understand him; I do not. Not because one desperate drive makes two lives the same; it does not. But because, for the first time, I can feel the outline of that motion from the inside. The strange, irrational hope that if you can just keep moving, if you can just get somewhere else, if you can just cross one more line on the map, then maybe the life behind you will loosen its grip.
Maybe he was not only leaving.
Maybe he was trying, in the only way he could still imagine, to arrive somewhere.
We always had our conflicts.
When I chose to live with him during my teenage years, he moved to second shift not long after. I never fully made up my mind whether that was necessity, or whether it was a choice made because I reminded him too much of everything he had lost.
Maybe both were true. Life rarely gives us motives cleanly enough to sort them into one box.
During those years, we fought. Viciously, at times. And I was not always easy to raise; there were periods when I was angry, wounded, defiant, and largely ungovernable. I can say that now without excusing anything on either side. We were two people carrying more than we knew how to name, trapped for a while inside the same collapsed house of expectations.
In recent years, we made honest attempts to stay in touch. We called periodically, and for a long stretch, even weekly. We made our peace. We offered each other forgiveness for the past.
I encouraged him to make friends, to go back to church, to become part of a community again. I talked with him about his medical issues. I tried, without much success, to convince him to draw down his retirement and start claiming Social Security. I tried to help him choose life in practical ways.
But neither of us reached out as often as I now wish we had.
This, it seems, is what death does. It turns every missed call, every delayed visit, every I should check in soon into something you can no longer undo.
It was never because love was absent, but because ordinary life always convinces us there will be another chance to prove it.
Until there is not.
I do not want to position my father’s life as a warning to others.
He knew his own value, even when he did not trust others to accept it. He loved fiercely, even after he knew what it could cost. And he was, for better or worse, proud of my sister and me.
I know he loved us. I know from our many long conversations in recent years that there was much he wished had gone differently. But through him, I learned to truly understand that you cannot change the past.
The only choice we ever really have is how to move forward.
Dad, if you are somehow reading this, or if even the echo of it reaches you, I want you to know that you never had to be perfect.
You deserved love. You deserved respect. Even when you saw too little evidence of either.
It may have taken until the last year or so, after I had built a home and a family of my own, for me to really hear you say you were proud of me. But I hope you know that, for all the weight you carried and all the effort you invested, I am proud too.
Proud to have had you as my father.
I will not pretend to remember my father as a happy man, however much I wish I could. I wish there were more memories untouched by exhaustion, distance, or the long shadow of everything that broke after the life he thought he had built came apart.
I do not know what comes next. But if his journey continues to the other shore, as he believed, I hope he finds there some measure of the peace he so rarely accepted here.
And I hope he knows that he carries my love with him.
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